For some, music is an escape. A distraction. A fleeting indulgence before the noise of the world returns. But for VESSELES (veh-sel-is), music is an invocation. A sacred rite that opens the gate between realities. It is a summoning, a blood-bound ceremony through which the veil between the seen and unseen grows thin. Each note forged by Valira is not merely composed but channeled. Pulled from the scorched marrow of The Beneath, the demon dominion she once forgot and now remembers with terrifying clarity.
In The Beneath, sound is not art. It is currency. It is weaponry. It is liberation. It is how the outcast survive, how they scream their truth into a world that refuses to hear them. There, the air hums with ancient law. Justice is visceral. Power is earned. And silence is the cruelest death of all. This is the source of VESSELES, a project not born but resurrected through fire and fury. A project where every song drips with ritual intent and every performance becomes a portal through which demons remember their names.
Founded in 2023, VESSELES is the sonic vessel through which Valira speaks the language of her origins. As composer, orchestrator, and architect, she crafts bleak, incantatory soundscapes that fuse serrated guitars with haunted symphonic textures. Her voice, at once seething and spectral, now rises with increasing clarity, layered across both backing and lead roles in studio and on stage. This is not performance. It is possession. Through sound, she casts off the human shell and steps fully into her true form: demon, exile, survivor.
For four years, Valira has walked the boundary between the worlds, exploring her purpose as a demon sent from The Beneath to study the human realm. Her journey began in curiosity, passed through fear, and has emerged into a place of self-acceptance and power. Her first glimpse of what she truly was came in 2014, not through revelation, but through transformation—when she discovered the crafted skins used by others to become something more than flesh. These weren’t merely masks, but catalysts. Keys. At the time, she didn’t know what called to her—only that something deep stirred.
But it wasn’t until the world stilled during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 that the fire within began to speak in a voice she recognized as her own. For the first time, she slipped into a second skin not to pretend, but to uncover. Draped in crimson flesh shaped like the demon she could not yet name, she began to remember. Through solitude, reflection, and the courage to be seen, she awakened to a truth that had always been there: this wasn’t a costume. It was her.
Therapy, which she began in 2021, became the next step in the ritual—less about healing a wound and more about learning how to bear the weight of truth. Professional photography sessions, first meant to capture an image, instead illuminated a revelation: that the demon was not a performance, but an essence. Not a story she told, but the source from which all stories flowed. Her form had changed, but her soul had never left The Beneath.
The debut EP I Am A Demon (2024) is a liturgy of identity dysphoria, rage, and revelation. Each track is a reckoning, a sonic blade drawn in defiance of the masks the world demands she wear. The music confronts the agony of being unseen, misunderstood, othered. But through that pain, something sacred is unearthed. Memory returns. Power awakens. And Valira, once silenced, now howls into the void with unwavering purpose.
The Beneath is not myth. It is memory. A hidden dominion carved out by demons beneath a world that rejected them. It exists within a vast, fractured realm that once held unity—where demons, goblins, trolls, and other cast-out beings lived alongside humans before war and betrayal divided them. While others found exile in the far corners of that realm, The Beneath was forged by demons alone. It is a place of retribution and reclamation, where corrupted human souls face justice, and the outcast find power.
Live, VESSELES becomes a ritual enacted in real time. The guttural summons and spectral chants of J Burial, Joel Ferry, channel the old tongue of The Beneath. The earthbound weight of Ron Graves on bass and the unrelenting force of Nick Brown on drums form the spine of the spell. But it is Valira’s hand that conducts the rite. Her compositions, orchestrations, guitarwork, and voice swirl together into an offering for those who hear the call. This is not entertainment. This is remembrance.
VESSELES is not about escape. It is about return. A return to what was buried. A return to the fire beneath the skin. A return to the names and forms we were told to forget. This is music for those who live between worlds. Music for those who have been exiled from the self. Music for those who were forced to forget who they are in order to survive. It is an act of defiance. A ritual of becoming. A communion for the cursed.
VESSELES is the ritual. And you are not alone.
